Island on the Edge Read online

  ISLAND ON THE EDGE

  First published in 2016 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  Copyright © Anne Cholawo 2016

  Part-title illustrations by the author

  The moral right of Anne Cholawo to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored or transmitted in any form without the express

  written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 978 1 78027 349 5

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Typeset by Initial Typesetting Services, Edinburgh

  Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta

  To Robert

  for his support and loving companionship

  Dallas Jane Roodhyuzen and David Hollingsworth

  for aid, food, clothes, sanctuary and unwavering friendship

  Jemma and Luke Cholawo

  for being a part of it all

  CONTENTS

  List of illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s note

  Maps

  PART ONE

  1Access by courtesy of fishing boat

  2A Luton interlude

  3I buy a house on Soay

  4Arrival

  5Waking dream

  6Sheep, sharks and settlers

  7Close encounters

  8Island DIY

  9Fishing with Tex

  10The piano

  11Home bred and butchered

  12Winkling a living

  13Cold comfort

  14Island spring

  PART TWO

  15A changing island

  16Thundering hooves

  17Fire at Burnside

  18Ebb and flow

  19Adventures with the Heron

  20Shipping forecast

  21Snow and drought

  22End of an era

  PART THREE

  23An end and a beginning

  24The battle to save Sally B

  25Taking the plunge

  26Accidental self-sufficiency

  Postscript: An island on the edge

  List of illustrations

  Soay harbour, with the ruined shark factory.

  Glenfield House.

  Tex and Jeanne Geddes.

  The remains of Gavin Maxwell’s shark factory.

  The loch, Isle of Soay.

  Helicopter drop by the Marines: the arrival of my piano.

  My first winkle boat.

  Taffy.

  Tex in Petros.

  Dallas Jane Roodhuyzen, known as DJ.

  Tork, the Labrador ‘collie’.

  Lachie, the collie.

  Soay House.

  The Schoolhouse.

  Jeanne’s four white Sanaan goats.

  Tex and myself feeding foals.

  Maintaining Sally B’s engine.

  Soay shopping trip.

  Geese enjoying the pond.

  Robert on our invaluable workboat.

  Hired hands at work.

  Collecting up the fleeces.

  Blondie in the cart with Biddy and Tex.

  Seumas the stallion arriving in the hold of Petros.

  Heron being beached for a much needed makeover.

  Petros beached and ready for a new coat of anti-foul paint.

  Taking Heron around to the safety of the harbour.

  Soay Bay.

  Raft test run.

  Robert and I after a golden autumn day, Leac Mhor.

  Acknowledgements

  All references to Soay’s pre-evacuation history taken from The Soay of our Forefathers by Laurance Reed, published by Birlinn Ltd.

  Photographs are reproduced by kind consent of Jemma Cholawo, Robert Cholawo and DJ Roodhyuzen. All other illustrations are my own.

  I would like to express my wholehearted gratitude to my editor, Fay Young, for her encouragement, hard work and invaluable input. She has helped to bring this book together in a way that I could not have achieved on my own.

  Author’s note

  Since the publication of Harpoon at a Venture by Gavin Maxwell in the early 1950s, the extraordinary human story of those who lived on the Isle of Soay in the years after Maxwell’s failed shark fishing enterprise has remained untold.

  Laurance Reed’s invaluable book The Soay of our Forefathers tackles the chronological history of the island from its original ownership by the MacLeods of Dunvegan to the evacuation of the population in 1953. Laurance researched and wrote his book while he was living on the island amongst a newly established post-evacuation population, which was flourishing and relatively stable.

  There are surely others who came to live on Soay after the evacuation in 1953 with stories to tell more exciting than mine. However, I do believe that it is important that someone should relate the deeply human aspects of Soay’s post-evacuation history. The people who were living and working on the island when I first arrived in 1990 were a powerful influence on me and changed my outlook on life forever.

  Soay is a very different island to the one that I discovered when I arrived to make a new life here in 1990. In those days there were seventeen inhabitants on the island. I could never have imagined that I would be one of only three full-time residents twenty-six years later. Friends, neighbours and the unforgettable personalities who occupied the houses round the bay are all gone. Yet every time I repair a drystone wall, drill a hole, splice a piece of rope or load another fishbox full of seaweed onto the garden, it reminds me of my former neighbours. Without their help, support, experience and guidance my hopes of a new life would have ended before my first year on Soay was over.

  For want of anyone more qualified, I have written about life and events on Soay over the last twenty-six years in the only way I know how: from my own experiences. Some observations will be flawed and possibly on occasion even misconstrued, but they are as accurate as I can make them, allowing certain artistic license for readability purposes. It is my own story.

  Anne Cholawo,

  Isle of Soay

  July 2016

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Access by courtesy of fishing boat

  September 1989

  Who knows why it caught my eye. On the last day of my holiday on the Isle of Skye I stopped in front of the Portree Estate Agency and there it was. Nothing special. A single colour photograph of Glenfield House showed the front view of a simple, stone-built, one-and-a-half-storey house with a corrugated iron roof. The details were sketchy: just the purchase price and the information that this former croft house was located on the Isle of Soay.

  I had never heard of the Isle of Soay. More to the point, I had no idea it was actually an island. This was my first visit to the Hebrides, I knew very little about the Highlands and in my ignorance I confused Soay with Isleornsay, a village at the southern end of Skye. Even so the house captured my imagination. I had only glanced briefly at the picture but the image was burned into my memory. It travelled with me on the five hundred and seventy mile journey home and would not go away. Back in Bedfordshire, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Glenfield House followed me on the daily commute to and from London and it wasn’t long before I succumbed to temptation. I contacted the Portree Estate Agency and asked for more details. One evening I came home from my job as a graphic artist in a London advertising agency
to find a thin, brown A4 envelope on the doormat. I opened it with barely suppressed excitement and looked more intently at the photograph attached to the property’s details. The envelope contained a single piece of A3 paper folded in two and the description of the house was brief and, for an estate agency, overly honest:

  A stone built traditional one-and-a-half-storey croft house with corrugated iron roof. The property comprises of a front entrance hall, a kitchen with a solid fuel Rayburn for cooking and hot water; a two ringed Calor gas cooker and gas fridge. There is a sitting room with a large open fireplace. On the second floor are two main bedrooms plus one small box room/bedroom. There is a large extension to the rear of the building, which consists of a back hall, pantry, bathroom/shower-room and small side room. The property has a moderately sized walled garden area and one drystone outhouse. The property also has a private water supply and cesspit. There is no electricity. Offers over £28,000.

  I was confused by the last phrase in the details:

  Access by courtesy of fishing boat.

  But it merely added to my interest. I didn’t have any real understanding of what I might be getting myself into if I took this ‘whim’ a stage further.

  Up to that point, my life had been a mostly urban existence; from my childhood in the industrial sprawl of Luton, to the tiny two-up-one-down cottage that I had been fortunate enough to purchase a few years earlier in the relatively quieter village of Aspley Guise, near Woburn Abbey. So far, I had known nothing but the comforts of modern conveniences and I had never been very far from civilised suburbia. I was well on my way to becoming a real ‘yuppie’ (young, upwardly propelled person). Maggie Thatcher’s brave new capitalist England of the 1980s had dominated my young adulthood and made its mark on the way I viewed life. London seemed to me to be the centre of the world.

  My brand new red Citroen 2CV was the vehicle of choice for female media-types like myself. My little low-ceilinged cottage was slowly filling up with appropriately ‘tasteful’ furniture hunted out in local antique shops. My aspirations included promotion at work and perhaps a slightly bigger property when or if I could afford it; this time with a dining room to entertain friends. However, beneath the surface lurked an insistent childhood dream that whispered at the back of my mind. I can’t even remember where it originally came from. Perhaps it was from reading books like Willow Farm by Enid Blyton, Children of the New Forest by Captain Marryat or the wonderful C.S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia. Perhaps it was fired by the majestic, soaring landscapes of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

  Or was it from spending days by a river, canal or lake finding ways to occupy my time while Dad, and sometimes my elder sister, obsessively fished for carp and bream in the dark waters? It was a magical way to absorb the sounds and movements of animal and bird life, to appreciate the beauty of the crowded verdant riverbank or just to have time to sit and think. It was certainly a stark contrast to our hometown environment.

  I vividly remember one of my first essays at school written when I was around seven years old. The topic was ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’ I began: ‘When I grow up I want to live in the middle of nowhere.’ I think I had first heard this phrase used when I was much younger about a summer holiday we had in North Wales. We stayed in what seemed to me to be a very remote farmhouse nestling in the mountains, where the ‘loo’ was outside the house and across the yard, near to the cowshed. Mum had to carry me over to it at night wearing wellies and a coat over her nightie. This made a very big impression on me at the time. After that ‘the middle of nowhere’ always conjured up an exciting and mysterious place in my over-active imagination. Of course, it was just a silly childish fantasy. No one would possibly believe that a child’s dream could become a reality.

  From my little cottage, I commuted everyday to London and back on the busy and often hopelessly jammed-up M1 motorway. It never seemed to be free of traffic whatever the time of day or night. Once off the North Circular, I navigated through the London byways ruthlessly. I had soon become adept at the peculiarly aggressive driving techniques mastered by veteran inter-city drivers and only tolerated within the city’s limits through dire necessity. It was ‘survival of the fittest’. Without these unbelievably selfish and downright rude driving practices picked up from other desperate London commuters, I would not have been able to get to Westbourne Grove, battle for a parking slot, and still start work on time. I had to leave home by six thirty every morning to be sure of being at the studio by nine. Half of that time was simply spent waiting stoically in a long, motionless queue of cars.

  You may be wondering why I didn’t use public transport. Interestingly, it was actually cheaper for me to use my car than the train in those days when fuel was around £1.70 per gallon and the odious car clamp in London was a relatively new phenomenon. It was more convenient as I often worked late, and I took my dog to work with me. I also thought it safer as I was sometimes leaving work near to midnight and on my own.

  On late summer evenings, trapped in an interminable traffic jam on my way home, I dreamt of escape. Low on the horizon, beyond the vanishing point of the motorway and stationary vehicles, great mounds and columns of cloud would build up, masking the setting sun. The flat featureless landscapes of Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire were a perfect setting for my imagination to create enormous mountain ranges and steep, mysterious gorges. Sometimes if the evening light was just right, I could include snow-capped peaks too. I imagined that I was on the start of a long, adventurous quest to those mountains and eventually I might find myself in a wondrous new world. It certainly made the tedious journey a little more tolerable.

  I suppose there must have been various physical and emotional forces at work during this period in my life. The exhausting commuting distances and long working hours were certainly a contributory factor to my feelings of restlessness and ever increasing, but barely acknowledged, discontent. In rare moments of quiet reflection I asked myself: ‘Is this really all there is?’

  That simple and lonely looking house in the photograph said ‘Adventure’ with a capital A. At least I had enough sense to realise that whatever new life I might propose for myself it would be imperative to have a roof over my head without a mortgage to worry about while I established what kind of adventure I was going to have. At a very rough guess, I believed that Glenfield House was just within my financial reach. Even as these thoughts raced through my mind I don’t think I was seriously committed to the idea, just toying with a tantalising dream.

  It took me a few days to build up the courage to telephone the proprietor of Glenfield House to ask for more details and perhaps arrange to see it. Before I made the phone call I was still totally ignorant of the fact that the house was on a tiny and little-known island. It was the owner, John Gilbertson, who patiently explained that the only way of getting to see the house was on his fishing boat. Soay was not even big enough to justify a ferry service. Only then did I finally grasp that the property was on an island and not in a village as I had originally thought. Perversely, this discovery only increased my curiosity and made me even more determined to see it. I was twenty-seven years old and thought myself quite the worldly adult. With the benefit of hindsight, more maturity and/or experience, I may well have been put off by the discovery that this house really was in the middle of nowhere; on a remote island with no mains services, shops, jetty or proper road and in particular no public transport at all. Added to that, there would not be much prospect of making a reasonable income to live on. These difficulties did not occur to me at all and nothing but blind optimism and romantic notions clouded my horizon.

  A week or so later, in early October, I took the remains of my holiday quota and drove all the way back up to Skye. I had arranged by telephone to meet John Gilbertson at the jetty in Elgol on Skye, the nearest village to Soay. John was a fisherman and skipper of his own boat so he was able to take me the four miles from Elgol to Soay bay to view the house. I had been fortunate with the we
ather, he said, it was going to be possible to get across to the island that day. It had never entered my mind that I might not get over there. John came alongside the narrow Elgol jetty in his creel boat, Guiding Light. I saw for the first time the Cuillin Mountains soaring straight upwards out of the sea away to the North – real mountains, not figments of my imagination. On the jetty a lone fisherman sat mending creels (lobster pots). All was quiet except for the wind and waves. Behind the fisherman, the sea and sky were slate grey with the occasional flash of white toppling from a breaking wave. I saw islands dotted around, but could not guess which was Soay. I had not even thought to look on a map. The scene entranced me; it was so completely outside my limited experience, almost Tolkienesque and surreal. John’s boat rolled roundly in the waves as she came alongside the jetty. I got aboard her and tried not to say too much so as not to betray my ignorance. After a while it was evident we were heading toward a low-lying piece of land close to the mountains. As we drew nearer, I made out a few houses dotted along a fairly sheltered bay. We moored, John rowed me ashore in his dinghy and we stepped onto the beach – luckily I had at least had the forethought to wear wellingtons otherwise I would have spent the afternoon with soaking wet feet. We walked up a cleared area of stones and headed left along a grassy track. After passing a few houses, one of which was whitewashed, we came to the last property on the south part of the bay. I recognised it instantly. I had studied the photograph of the house and what I could see of the surrounding area minutely. I would look at it whenever I felt like a little escape.

  On the way to Glenfield, John had been telling me about the people who lived on the island. I tried to take it all in but was getting terribly muddled about names and identities. I got Gavin Maxwell: I knew about his book, Ring of Bright Water, and even remembered seeing the film. But I got him mixed up with Tex Geddes, otters and sharks. I thought Tex was some sort of Yankee eccentric, and that Gavin Maxwell was still on Soay fishing. John Gilbertson must have thought me a prize idiot. There was just too much going on all at once for me to take in.